Free your Frees

February 18, 2016

I was working on a project of Alex Crough’s at the SF Haskell Hack Night which takes the Free monad to a whole new level. The primary reasoning behind Elision was that Free is actually not “free” enough when it comes to constraints and testing.

An Elision doesn’t require that you pass it a functor, and on top of this, it’s also possible to “hot-swap” (or “mock” if you prefer) implementation details while unit-testing. This allows you to do things like have integration-styled unit tests; focusing on input and output of your business logic, rather than being forced to quickcheck every detail in-between.

It feels more like mocking than anything I’ve seen in haskell so far, so I’m pretty excited to have been introduced!